"How to conduct 1:1s"

Last Sunday (September 24, 2017), our first SJTU-SV Career Club meeting of 2017-2018 was held successfully, the two-hour workshop was “How to conduct 1:1s with direct boss and skip-level managers”. This was a interactive session with presentation, case study and discussion, led by Vicky Xu and Ying Zhang.

Mentor: Vicky Xu

Vicky Xu

Recently joined Google in the Google Cloud Division ensuring all the Cloud Service offerings work well end to end.

Prior to that, Vicky was a Sr. Director at VMware delivering software solutions to power Private Cloud for enterprise customers. Vicky enjoys reading about business strategy and leadership topics. She actively seeks mentors in her career and gives back by mentoring others, both at work and in her personal life.

Self-introduction and goals for this workshop

Club ushered some new and young attendees, who are working at different possitions from different companies. At the beginning of the session, people got to know each other, and shared what we want to achieve from this workshop including “How to get better 2-way understanding between boss and myself”, “How to behave in 1:1 meeting with manager to be more effective”, “What we learned from 1:1 meeting”, “When and how should we do skip-level 1:1”?

Goals for 1:1

1:1 meeting is different from bigger meetings in terms of ‘format’, ‘topics’, ‘reconcile difference’ and ‘constructive feedback’. Vicky summarized the goals for 1:1 and shared stories based on her past personal experience.

Skip-level 1:1

Skip-level 1:1 is needed and is important under some situations. From Vicky’s presentation and attendees’ shared stories, we learned the goal of skip-level 1:1, what does my boss’s boss want to hear from me, and some protocal about skip-level 1:1

Behavior during 1:1

Most important and practical part is how to behave during 1:1. Six case studies based on real and common situation we are facing in work were provided, attendees were devided into three groups to discuss and provide solution to the ‘roles’ in cases. Vicky also provided some general etiquette, as well as common mistakes we may make, there are all very practical professional advice.

Signals to catch from 1:1

In the end, we were also asked the question “what you learned from 1:1?” This is a question pivotal but usually got neglected by most of people. Vicky listed some typical ‘signals’ to catch, we can actually find out a lot more information from 1:1s.